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We use US household-level bank account data to investigate the heterogeneous effects of the pandemic on spending and savings. Households across the income distribution all cut spending from March to early April. Since mid-April, spending has rebounded most rapidly for low-income households. We find large increases in liquid asset balances for households throughout the income distribution. However, lower-income households contribute disproportionately to the aggregate increase in balances, relative to their prepandemic shares. Taken together, our results suggest that spending declines in the initial months of the recession were primarily caused by direct effects of the pandemic, rather than resulting from labor market disruptions. The sizable growth in liquid assets we observe for low-income households suggests that stimulus and insurance programs during this period likely played an important role in limiting the effects of labor market disruptions on spending.

This book explores the invention, making, and buying of new, semi-luxury, and fashionable consumer goods during the 18th century. It follows these goods, from china tea ware to all sorts of metal ornaments such as candlesticks, cutlery, buckles, and buttons, as they were made and shopped for, then displayed in the private domestic settings of Britain's urban middling classes. It tells the stories and analyses the developments that led from a global trade in Eastern luxuries beginning in the sixteenth century to the new global trade in British-made consumer goods by the end of the 18th century. These new products, regarded as luxuries by the rapidly growing urban and middling-class people of the 18th century, played an important part in helping to proclaim personal identities and guide social interaction. Customers enjoyed shopping for them; they took pleasure in their beauty, ingenuity or convenience. All manner of new products appeared in shop windows; sophisticated mixed-media advertising seduced customers and created new desires. This unparalleled ‘product revolution’ provoked philosophers and pundits to proclaim a ‘new luxury’, one that reached out to the middling and trading classes, unlike the elite and corrupt luxury of old. This book is built on a fresh empirical base drawn directly from customs accounts, advertising material, company papers, and contemporary correspondence. The book traces how this new consumer society of the 18th century and the products first traded, then invented to satisfy it, stimulated industrialisation itself.

•We meta-analyze 71 papers on consumer spending outcomes across payment methods.•Consumers spend more when using cashless methods (vs. cash) – the “cashless effect.”.•The cashless effect is stronger (weaker) in conspicuous (pro-social) consumption situations.•The cashless effect is stronger (weaker) during periods of economic growth (over time). Over 40 years of research links cashless payment methods to increased consumer spending. Referred to as the “cashless effect,” this phenomenon has recently come under scrutiny as consumers are increasingly familiar with non-cash methods which could weaken the cashless effect, while other research challenges the robustness of the effect and questions which conditions could strengthen or weaken it. The current study contributes to reaching a consensus in this ongoing debate through a large-scale meta-analysis leveraging a meta-analytical framework that synthesizes the insights from the extant literature. Across 392 effect sizes from 71 papers, we reveal a small, but significant, cashless effect. Further, we show no evidence that cashless payment method features influence the cashless effect, while various consumption situations and contextual factors do. Specifically, the cashless effect is stronger in conspicuous consumption situations, while it is weaker in pro-social consumption situations. The results also reveal that the business cycle impacts the cashless effect, with it being stronger in periods of economic growth. Finally, the cashless effect has generally weakened over time. Our findings offer novel and actionable insights for academics, consumers, and practitioners such as retailers, charities, and policymakers interested in the effects of payment methods on consumer spending behavior. [Display omitted]

This book will be the first book that systematically analyzes the different waves of consumer nationalism in China, the types of its nationalistic consumer actions, and the critical impact of the new wave which has increased the possibility of a consumer base that could turn hostile at any moment.

PurposeThe study aims to identify the antecedents of consumers' collaborative fashion purchase intention by analysing innovativeness, self-confidence and consumer spending self-control variables as antecedents.Design/methodology/approachA descriptive quantitative research was performed to verify the influence of such variables based on data collected through an online survey and analysed by structural equation modelling (SEM), which resulted in a final sample of 230 valid respondents.FindingsThe main findings include innovativeness as a strong antecedent of intention to consume collaborative fashion. However, self-confidence and consumer spending self-control are not related to adopting this consumption format, suggesting that collaborative fashion can promote reverse effects by stimulating excessive consumption.Practical implicationsThe results can assist companies of collaborative fashion to enhance their strategies to attract consumers looking for creative reuse of items, for example, by offering repair, revitalisation services and promoting meetings to share tips on how to reuse items creatively. Companies can also improve communication campaigns by focussing on the product itself, rather than price, which seems to be more effective in the context of collaborative fashion consumption.Originality/valueThe study is amongst the first to analyse the influence of consumers' personality traits towards collaborative fashion consumption and provide the scope with findings on the interrelationship between personality traits and consumer rationality, which can broaden the understanding about the potential rebound effects in this context.

Yugoslavia was unique among the communist countries of the Cold War era in its openness to mixing cultural elements from both socialism and capitalism. Unlike their counterparts in the nations of the Soviet Bloc, ordinary Yugoslavs enjoyed access to a wide range of consumer goods and services, from clothes and appliances to travel agencies and discotheques. From the mid-1950s onward the political climate in Yugoslavia permitted, and later at times encouraged, a consumerist lifestyle of shopping, spending, acquiring, and enjoying that engaged the public on a day-to-day basis through modern advertising and sales techniques. InBought and Sold, Patrick Hyder Patterson reveals the extent to which socialist Yugoslavia embraced a consumer culture usually associated with capitalism and explores the role of consumerism in the federation's collapse into civil war in 1991. Patterson argues, became a land where the symbolic, cultural value of consumer goods was a primary factor in individual and group identity. He shows how a new, aggressive business establishment promoted consumerist tendencies that ordinary citizens eagerly adopted, while the Communist leadership alternately encouraged and constrained the consumer orientation. Abundance translated into civic contentment and seemed to prove that the regime could provide goods and services equal to those of the capitalist West, but many Yugoslavs, both inside and outside the circles of official power, worried about the contradiction between the population's embrace of consumption and the dictates of Marxist ideology. The result was a heated public debate over creeping consumerist values, with the new way of life finding fierce critics and, surprisingly for a communist country, many passionate and vocal defenders.

The article is devoted to the development of tools for evaluating the level and dynamics of Ukrainian households' well-being, by considering the availability of key groups of goods for households with different levels of per capita income. The results should contribute to taking into account a greater number of essential aspects of the households lifestyle and economic capabilities for assessing the achieved level of well-being, its dynamics, the differences of its components for different population groups, allowing to make policy and programs for its implementation more sensitive to the real needs of different aim groups.Engel's curves (defined by the linear form of consumption dependence on income – Working's function) and income elasticity of consumption were used to assess the degree of satisfaction of needs in two commodities, which are key for assessing the households' well-being. It was evidenced, that the still high (more than two times higher than in developed countries) income elasticity of food consumption indicates the extreme limitation of the resource provision for investing in the development of human capital by the households. At the same time, the propensity of households to invest additional income in the purchase of goods created in healthcare is quite high – at the level of developed countries. More affluent households (which were expected to have a higher income elasticity of healthcare goods consumption) are more actively using the advances of insurance medicine, while less affluent households still rely only on \"out-of-pocket\" healthcare costs. So, relatively poorer households are faced a clear lack of resources to meet their needs: the absolute amount of healthcare goods consumption for the least wealthy households is reduced against the background of the increase in the share of relevant expenses in the composition of consumer spending.

Material culture in Eastern Europe under state socialism is remembered as uniformly gray, shabby, and monotonous-the worst of postwar modernist architecture and design. Politics in Color and Concrete revisits this history by exploring domestic space in Hungary from the 1950s through the 1990s and reconstructs the multi-textured and politicized aesthetics of daily life through the objects, spaces, and colors that made up this lived environment. Krisztina Féherváry shows that contemporary standards of living and ideas about normalcy have roots in late socialist consumer culture and are not merely products of postsocialist transitions or neoliberalism. This engaging study decenters conventional perspectives on consumer capitalism, home ownership, and citizenship in the new Europe.

How do we integrate the theoretical underpinnings of social reproduction theory (SRT) into our understanding of the social harms inflicted upon us? How can we use it to inform our struggles and affect societal change under capitalism? Integrating our understanding of productive and reproductive spheres and exploring the connection between identity-based oppression and class exploitation, SRT has emerged as a powerful Marxist frame for social analysis and political practice. In this book, Aaron Jaffe extracts SRT's radical potential, relying on recent struggles, including the International Women's Strike and the teachers' strikes, showing how we can use SRT to motivate socialist politics and strategy. Using social reproduction theory to appreciate distinct forms of social domination, this unique and necessary book will have vital strategic implications for anti-capitalists, anti-racists, LGBT activists, disability activists and feminists.

*Selected by Emma Watson for her Ultimate Book List* Fashion is political. From the red carpets of the Met Gala to online fast fashion, clothes tell a story of inequality, racism and climate crisis. In The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion, Tansy E. Hoskins unpicks the threads of capitalist industry to reveal the truth about our clothes. Fashion brands entice us to consume more by manipulating us to feel ugly, poor and worthless, sentiments that line the pockets of billionaires exploiting colonial supply chains. Garment workers on poverty pay risk their lives in dangerous factories, animals are tortured, fossil fuels extracted and toxic chemicals spread just to keep this season's collections fresh. We can do better than this. Moving between Karl Lagerfeld and Karl Marx, The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion goes beyond ethical fashion and consumer responsibility showing that if we want to feel comfortable in our clothes, we need to reshape the system and ensure this is not our last season.